Abstract
Statecraft may be defined as “the use of instruments at the disposal of central political authorities to serve foreign policy purposes.” That definition, though, may admit of a narrower and a broader understanding. The narrower and perhaps more cynical notion imagines statecraft as the management of a power struggle for the sake of self- preservation. Even the Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations conceives statecraft as fundamentally about “managing relations between states to the advantage of one’s own country.” With roots extending at least as far back as Machiavelli’s The Prince with its infamous preoccupation with preserving power in the face of internal and external enemies, this may be the most common contemporary sense of the term. But a broader understanding of statecraft has arisen in modern scholarship, and perhaps in experience. Charles Anderson notes in his 1977 book Statecraft, that the word is an old north European term for “the science of government” and in connection with the modern state essentially consists of “impos[ing] direction and form on the course of human affairs.” According to Jochen Prantl and Evelyn Goh, the term may be better understood as “the skill of securing the survival and prosperity of a sovereign state.” By this way of thinking, “the successful or unsuccessful conduct of statecraft may settle the fate of our way of life.” In this vein, Alasdair Roberts in his 2019 book “Strategies for Governing” conceives statecraft to encompass all aspects of the “creation, maintenance, and adaptation of the state and political order, both internal and external.” Similarly, Colin Talbot observes, “The term ‘statecraft’ can therefore be used as an all-embracing one for the study of states and governments and how to successfully build, run and adapt them, internally and externally." ...
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2024
Recommended Citation
Andrew B. Spalding, The U.S. Statecraft of Corporate Human Rights Obligations, 39 Md. J. Int'l L. 57 (2024).
